No One Knows (Song)
No One Knows is the second track off of QOTSA's third studio album, Songs For The Deaf. It was also a single from the album, growing extremely popular and becoming a modern rock staple. A music video was made, which also was very popular. Versions No One Knows This is the album version. It's four minutes and thirty-nine seconds long. Starting with a call-and-answer intro between the guitar and drums, the song then kicks into a funky groove. Josh then joins into the funkiness with his lyrics about rules, pills, and deserts. (Sounds like a damn good time.) The verses are almost irresistible to tap your foot to, but when the pre-chorus and the chorus comes in, that foot tapping quickly becomes head banging as those parts leak with hard rock power. Josh is pounding away at the chorus riff while Dave is doing what he does best, raping his drum set. After another verse and another chorus, we come to the bridge, which is the build up for the climax of the song. All sound drops for Nick's bass solo, and out of the darkness, the song explodes back out with a face-melting solo by Mr. Joshua Fucking Homme. It then falls back to just bass as Josh calmly says "heaven smiles above me" and strikes his guitar near the headstock, providing the feedback stab to signal everyone back. They do one more shortened verse and finish up the song just as it started, with a call-and-answer outro between the guitar and the drums. After this, there is a radio interlude where you switch the channel to a spanish station. You don't understand a word that they are saying except for "Queens Of The Stone Age!" and "First It Giveth!". Yeah, I'm scratching my head as much as you, buddy. No One Knows (Studio Version) This is the version that is on the Sample This School Boy promo EP. It's the exact same as the album version, except when the song stops, it ends with the outro to No One Knows and leaves out the radio interlude. No One Knows (Over The Years And Through The Woods) This version is featured on the Over The Years And Through The Woods live album. Played a tad faster than the studio version (as usual), it stays mostly the same until the second verse, where Josh drops the last two lines so they can go into jam mode. Troy is playing the spacey lead part as Josh is soloing and Joey is keeping a funky beat. After a bit of this, everything is dropped until there is nothing but Josh soloing and the crowd screaming. He then plays a new riff and the rest of the band joins back in to jam on this even funkier beat. It all comes to an intense climax with Joey doing a snare roll over Troy and Josh playing faster solos until everything suddenly stops. Josh then proceeds to sing the last two lines of the second verse and part of the first line of the second chorus acapella before the rest of the band joins back in. After that, the rest of the song is like the studio version, except for after the break trailing the guitar solo, all the instruments drop one last time to let Josh say a little speech to the London crowd. No One Knows (Flute, Orchestra, No Solo, Backing Vox, Piano) This version is only on the bootleg Demos For The Deaf. It is a bit unmixed, with the instruments a bit quieter and Josh's vocals louder and drier. It's quite the same as the album version until the chorus, where a flute and orchestra that are left out of the album version join in, with the flute playing the pre-chorus guitar riff and the orchestra playing it's own thing. The backing vocals are more upfront and noticeable in this version as well. During where the guitar solo should be, there is actually no guitar solo and it's a orchestra solo. Seriously. How awesome is that?! The song ends with someone whispering something over the outro and a piano striking a single note, letting it ring out for nearly thirty seconds. No One Knows (Total Backing Track) This version is also only on the bootleg Demos For The Deaf. It's an instrumental for the track, but it's very raw. Made up of early takes, all the instruments have subtle differences in playing and very big differences in sound. The spacey sounds during the second verse are a lot clearer and are made up of "ooh"ing. No One Knows (UNKLE Reconstruction - Full Length) This is a rare-ish version of the UNKLE remix of No One Knows. Clocking in at seven minutes and one second, it's the longest official QOTSA remix ever released. Made up mostly of a drum n' bass beat and synth structures, it's a farcry from the original version. Josh's vocals are used, but with a lot of delay effects. It breaks down a couple of times, to only have the spacey, sound scape-ish synth playing. After the intense climax, it starts to wind down and fade out with only the synth left. No One Knows (UNKLE Reconstruction - Radio Edit) This is a shorter edit of the remix, clocking in at only four minutes and thirty seven seconds. This version is on most releases of the Go With The Flow single. Josh's backing vocals come in immediately instead of letting the intro play for a bit without them. There are a lot less breaks between the vocals and the ones that are there are really shortened. The outro is also different, cutting into the middle of the song and fading out with Josh's backing vocals. This version has been used in many video games, such as SSX3, Test Drive Unlimited, and Race Driver: Grid. No One Knows (UNKLE Reconstruction - Instrumental) It's the same musically as the full length, except there are no traces of any vocals left. Even Josh's backing vocals are left out. Music Video The music video received heavy airplay on MTV2 (when, you know, it still played things having to do with music) due to it being nominated for the MTV2 Award at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003, but lost to AFI's "Girl's Not Grey". Yeah, you read that right. It also received heavy airplay on other video channels due to it just being fucking awesome. This is the only QOTSA video not made up of live performance footage (as he appears in the First It Giveth video) to feature Dave Grohl. The video is split up into two interchanging parts. Part 1 consists of Josh, Troy, Nick, and David Grohl jamming out in a dark room surrounded by a neon aura. This part fills in spaces between the lyrics in the beginning, switches back and forth between the first chorus to the second, then plays through the guitar solo and the final set of lyrics. Part 2 is the main adventure of the video, where Josh, Nick, and Troy are driving through backroads in a 1972 International Scout when they hit a male deer. they get out to see the deer to find out it's quite alive, and very pissed. catching them by surprise, the deer knocks the trio out and ties them to the hood of their truck, going on a joyride that encompasses running over a boy scout campsite and drifting through the parking lot of a brothel or stripclub. in the final section after the guitar solo, the deer pulls up to a house with a doe statuette on the front lawn, and then in the final scene jumps to him in bed with the statuette, with our luckless trio's taxidermied heads on the wall behind him. Live This song is played live at almost every show due to it being their biggest hit and what some would call their "signature song". When played live, it's usually extended by a very long jam session by the band, sometimes stretching to ten minutes. The crowd usually chants the guitar riff along to the song as a sign of respect to Homme. Lyrics We get some rules to follow That and this These and those No one knows We get these pills to swallow How they stick In your throat Tastes like gold Oh, what you do to me No one knows And I realize you're mine Indeed a fool am I And I realize you're mine Indeed a fool am I Ahh I journey through the desert Of the mind With no hope I found low I drift along the ocean Dead lifeboats in the sun And come undone Pleasently caving in I come undone And I realize you're mine Indeed a fool am I And I realize you're mine Indeed a fool am I Ahhh Heaven smiles above me What a gift here below But no one knows The gift that you give to me No one knows